You’ve carefully crafted each phrase. You finally hit “publish,” and what happens?
Nobody reads them. No comments, no tweets, no sharing on Facebook. It’s enough to send a writer into deep depression and wipe out motivation to keep producing great content. Think you need to spend another 10,000 hours perfecting your writing skills? Probably not. Actually, the solution may be a lot easier than you expect. Writing less and styling your text, so it’s easy to read, could be all you need to do to attract and hold attention.
Impatient searchers
Think about how you use the web. You’re in search of information. And if you don’t find it on the page you’re visiting, you click away and look elsewhere. The web is a “lean forward and participate” medium. Television, by contrast, is a “lean back and let it wash over me” medium. What can you do to engage your readers, so they lean into your content, stay on your pages, and interact with your information?
Make it snappy
Your precious words. You know they’ve got to be right to attract the audience you want.
You’ve carefully crafted each phrase. You finally hit “publish,” and what happens?
Nobody reads them. No comments, no tweets, no sharing on Facebook.
It’s enough to send a writer into deep depression and wipe out motivation to keep producing great content.
Think you need to spend another 10,000 hours perfecting your writing skills? Probably not.
Impatient searchers
Think about how you use the web. You’re in search of information. And if you don’t find it on the page you’re visiting, you click away and look elsewhere.
The web is a “lean forward and participate” medium. Television, by contrast, is a “lean back and let it wash over me” medium.
What can you do to engage your readers, so they lean into your content, stay on your pages, and interact with your information?
To write successfully for the web, you need to forget some of what you learned in English composition class.
Accept that people scan web pages, rather than read them in detail, and work with this reality rather than fight it.
If you want to cover a complex topic, consider breaking it into a series of posts.
It’s a great way to keep people coming back for more, and your reader will find it easier to digest your content if they get it in portion-controlled sizes.
Structure your paragraphs in the inverted-pyramid style.
That means stating your conclusion first, then supporting it with the sentences that follow. It helps scanners move from point to point and decide where they’d like to dive in deeper.
Once you’ve done that, use the following easy design techniques to make your content much more reader-friendly.
It just takes a few minutes to turn an overwhelming mass of text into a post that engages the reader and pulls her in.
1. Embrace the line break
There are few easier ways to make your content more readable. Even complex content can be made much more reader-friendly with the simple introduction of lots of white space. Feature one idea per paragraph, and keep them short — three or four sentences at most. And try writing some paragraphs with only one sentence.
2. Break up your content with compelling subheads
Your precious words. You know they’ve got to be right to attract the audience you want.
You’ve carefully crafted each phrase. You finally hit “publish,” and what happens?
Nobody reads them. No comments, no tweets, no sharing on Facebook.
It’s enough to send a writer into deep depression and wipe out motivation to keep producing great content.
Think you need to spend another 10,000 hours perfecting your writing skills? Probably not.
Actually, the solution may be a lot easier than you expect. Writing less and styling your text, so it’s easy to read, could be all you need to do to attract and hold attention.
Want to Learn How to Make Content Marketing Profitable for Your Business?
1. Embrace the line break
There are few easier ways to make your content more readable. Even complex content can be made much more reader-friendly with the simple introduction of lots of white space. Feature one idea per paragraph, and keep them short — three or four sentences at most. And try writing some paragraphs with only one sentence.
2. Break up your content with compelling subheads
Learning how to write headlines is vital for getting readers to check you out in the first place. And learning how to write subheadings is vital for keeping readers engaged. They act as “mini headlines” to keep them moving through the rest of your content. Make your subheads intriguing as well as informative. Web readers have well-honed BS meters, so don’t exaggerate, or you’ll lose credibility. “Compelling” is not the same as hyper. Once you’ve written your subheads, review them to see what readers/scanners will understand if they only read that part of your article. Is there a compelling story? Will they get the gist of your information?
3. Use “deep captions”
Studies have shown that image captions are consistently some most read copy on a page.
Try pairing a strong image with a “deep caption.”
Deep captions are two to three sentences long. That’s long enough to intrigue your reader to dig into your whole article.
4. Check your formatting to turn scanners into readers
Once you’ve used subheads, numbers, bulleted lists, and other formatting to highlight the key elements of your post, read through it again — looking only at the text you’ve called special attention to.
Does the reader get the gist?
Pull out the most interesting and relevant words — the words that will pull your scanner in and turn her into a reader.
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